Fiction and fact
To: JPR who wrote (10411)
From: Dipy
Saturday, Jan 1, 2000 3:49 PM ET
Reply # of 10422
Well, NYT also publishes fiction from time to time, you know
Here is a fiction , Fellow: NYTIMES section 14 page 2
Q. Is it true that an African pygmy was once exhibited at the Bronx Zoo?
A. For two miserable, tumultuous weeks in 1906, Ota Benga, a
23-year-old pygmy from the Belgian Congo, was put on display at what
was then called the New York Zoological Society in the Bronx. The
public, appalled and entertained in equal measure, flocked to the primate
house, where Benga could be observed playing with Dahong, the zoo's
orangutan, beneath a sign that read in part, "Height 4 feet 11 inches.
Weight 103 pounds. Exhibited each afternoon during September."
Benga was already something of a professional pygmy. After he was
enslaved by villagers near the Kasai River in 1904, Samuel P. Verner, an
American explorer and impresario, bought Benga's release and persuaded
him to help recruit other Batwa pygmies for the 1904 World's Fair in St.
Louis. Benga then agreed to accompany Verner to St. Louis, where he
was displayed - along with 1,400 American Indians, Japanese Ainus,
Eskimos and other "emblematic savages" - in the fair's anthropology
department. Verner and Benga later returned to Africa together, and went
to New York in 1906.
Verner, by that time penniless, left Benga in the care of the zoo, where it
was agreed he would live and hunt in a forest of several hundred acres,
apart from the exhibit area. Benga, who by that time spoke some English
and liked to wear white duck suits, was instead displayed before as many
as 40,000 spectators a day.
Facing protests from newspapers and black clergymen, the zoo's director,
William Temple Hornaday, allowed Benga to leave his cage and wander
freely around the zoo during the day, then return to the primate house to
sleep at night. But according to The New York Times, the crowds
"chased him around the grounds all day, howling, jeering and yelling."
"Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at
him," The Times said.
Exasperated by the growing scandal, Hornaday released Benga into the
care of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn. That
arrangement proved awkward, since Benga had been married twice, and
in 1910 he was placed in a seminary and college in Lynchburg, Va. He
later worked on a nearby tobacco farm and taught local boys how to hunt
in the woods. In 1916, lonely, despondent and homesick without a home,
Ota Benga took his own life. |
